I. You want to sketch them as birds, storks perhaps, or origami cranes, speechless and hungry, wrestling stubborn ears from shoots. You want them bent by the weight of history, and these fields to be the pages of their lives, their children's lives and their children's children's lives. Bowed by every failed harvest and centuries of typhoons and foreign invaders bringing noise.

II. You believe an ideology in purple robes raped these fields of men dressed them in heavy cloth dressed them with guns ordered them to kill pointing everywhere.

You believe a philosophy in pinstripes stole the future of these fields dressed the men in sweatshop suits gave them comic books taught them how to steal pointing everywhere.

You want these women to be written on the landscape forced into a right-angled existence held down by Yasukuni and Zainichi held down by Hiroshima and Nanking held down by doutaku bells struck 100 times and more held down by a hand on the nape.

Burn the flag! you cry. Storm the Temples!

You wear these women on T-shirts.

III. And then you walk with them crouch and push seedlings into mud feel translucent skin on yours hear laughter spill from toothless faces laughter born deep in the gut laughter at once ancient and coruscant.

Bakayaro! they mock

before they teach you how to snap your wrists and fill the sky with clouds of pure white chaffs moved by the wind to where steel prisons pass— curious faces pressed against the glass.